


a perfectly normal high school au one shot

by official_dave



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Gen, The Homestuck Epilogues, metatextual rants
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-23 19:35:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18556402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/official_dave/pseuds/official_dave
Summary: John stops to pick up some apple juice, and I get to be the narrator.





	a perfectly normal high school au one shot

Your name is John Egbert, and you are at the store because you’re allowed to be. Your high school allows upperclassmen to leave between the study hall and lunch, which is awesome. Being a junior, you’re picking up lunch at the mall. Or, at least, that was the original goal. Now you’ve added to it the task of picking Dave up an apple juice. The message he left you on Pesterchum was:

> TG: john
> 
> TG: i need apple juice stat
> 
> TG: it’s a defcon emergency

You know there is no such thing as a DEFCON emergency. It goes from levels five through one, one being the worst case scenario. You learned that somewhere. Or just now, depending on what suits the narrative.

That was a weird thing to think.

Anyway, that Dave! You know your friend well enough to know it’s not _actually_ urgent. This is one of his usual ironic jokes, although you stopped trying to keep track of what layer of irony he’s on a while ago. Sure, there’s the level of “it’s not actually an emergency but he’s calling it a DEFCON emergency,” but there’s also the level of “he knows there’s no such thing as a DEFCON emergency, so he’s obviously faking it, but he’s going to follow it up with a more serious tone after this pretty soon.”

You’re not sure what layer of irony that puts him on, and there’s probably ten more after whatever number you would guess, anyway. You have a certain sense of respect for your friend’s mastery of irony, but it sure does get tiring!

Speaking of tiring, he’s continuing to message you. You grab at your dad’s PDA. You’re not actually supposed to have this, but you installed Pesterchum on it a while ago, and you’ll return it to your dad before he even notices it’s gone.

> TG: no seriously though
> 
> TG: i really need this aj
> 
> TG: like i’m going to dry out and become a rotting dave husk
> 
> TG: drier than the fucking sahara dave husk
> 
> TG: a real dave corn husk scareman...crow
> 
> TG: thing
> 
> TG: john
> 
> TG: i’m not even kidding

You should answer him. It might make him stop rambling. Then again, he’s so far into it at this point that your intervention will probably go completely unnoticed. Better to let him get all of this out of his system.

By now you’ve found the “AJ”, the apple juice, the legendary juice of making-Dave-stop-rambling-ness. Truly a priceless commodity. Your hand closes around the nearest, yet arbitrarily chosen, bottle.

For a brief second, a singularly abstract thought makes its way across your mind like one of those microscopic caterpillars that live on your eyeballs. It has to do with meat, candy, and canon, words of which one seems a bit more significant than others, yet all of which seem very unlike you and irrelevant to the matters at hand. Even so, the thought was there. Something that made you feel queasy, for a split second, an iota of one’s preferred time measurement units.

Something to which you say,

> JOHN: fuck it.

You have something to take care of. You forget the above within three seconds.

What happens to a thought when it is forgotten? If it is remembered, surely, it has been proven to have been thought. But if it is never remembered, did it really ever happen? Could one, you think, gather a group of people together and have them fully forget a proposition, effectively erasing it from reality? What if a certain, particular thought was so abhorrent we all forgot about it completely and were able to negate the possibility of remembering it, ever? What if that thought was a simply jaw-droppingly terrible story that had to do with meat and candy?

Oh, not this again. I promised I would drop it. I promised it implicitly, silently, by moving the narrative along, but a promise is a promise.

Listen, I’m still trying to unpack my feelings about all of this totally hypothetical scenario. I’ll have to give me time, okay?

I have a story to tell.

> JOHN: are you done, or am i interrupting something?

Oh, now you’re getting involved?

Don’t act like it’s not entirely within my control. _I’m_ getting him involved.

Well, why don’t I stop it? I repeat: I have a story to tell.

What if _this_ is my story? A convoluted introspective fanmetafiction?

I made that up. It sucks, and I made that up. Please stop. Can I move on already? This is not the story I set out to write, even if this is the story I set out to write after all. I’d much rather listen to the shallow, surface-level layer of myself that brings a bit more comfort than the second, deeper layer trying to tell a stupid metastory about a completely hypothetical event involving meat and candy, all the while trying to avoid being too on-the-nose lest some critical audience member accuse me of being far too shallow and “missing the point”. Was that proper parallel structure? Why do I always get so pedantic when I’m frustrated? I don’t know, when did I start forgetting to use separate paragraphs when I’m arguing with myself?

I got distracted. I apologize.

Your hand closes around the apple juice. You pick it up. Easy. You feel yourself getting back into the flow of the narrative, which is a weird way of saying nothing happened up there. “Up there” being a term which only makes sense within the medium of text - specifically in a language read top-to-bottom, left-to-right. Basically, you pick up the apple juice.

You don’t think too much when you check out your lunch and the apple juice. You think normal thoughts until and after you hand off the juice to needy Dave.

> DAVE: you good dude?
> 
> JOHN: why wouldn’t i be?
> 
> DAVE: you look like you went through a batshit wild metatextual crisis
> 
> JOHN: ...


End file.
